Over the last couple of months we have been diligently compiling data on Australian Government Twitter accounts so that we could update the canonical list of Australian Public Service (APS) Twitter usage. Using the list available on Australia.gov.au as our starting point, we asked Government CIOs to list the accounts used in their organisation. As a result we have added another 40 to our list of known government Twitter accounts. Armed with this new list, we approached Twitter to have these accounts verified, as the blue tick will not only add authority to existing accounts but will also allow them to more easily escalate any problems directly with Twitter.
To our knowledge, only 3 accounts had been verified when we begin the process. Now, at last count, there are over 100 and the number will increase. We have just sent our final list to Twitter and will soon be updating the list on australia.gov.au to include the new accounts.
Getting down to the nitty gritty of statistics, we’ve collected some that may be of interest. As at 29 of April 2013, Australian Government Twitter accounts combined had 502,305 followers. A large proportion of the accounts (92) have more than 1000 followers and only 15 have less than 100 followers.
The most followed account @Australia (recently known as @see_australia) has over 43,000 followers – which brings us neatly to the top 20 most followed APS accounts today;
- @Australia – 43,845 Followers
- @2011Census – 16,803 Followers
- @CSIROnews – 16,178 Followers
- @RBAInfo – 14,443 Followers
- @dfat – 14,296 Followers
- @auscouncilarts – 13,608 Followers
- @ato_gov_au – 12,875 Followers
- @artsculturegov – 12,797 Followers
- @TourismAus – 11,984 Followers
- @NatGalleryAus – 11,683 Followers
- @AusAid – 11,266 Followers
- @AboutTheHouse – 11,079 Followers
- @nlagovau – 10,844 Followers
- @AusHumanRights - 10,839 Followers
- @ABSStats - 10,175 Followers
- @ScreenAustralia - 9,446 Followers
- @HealthAgeingAU – 8,819 Followers
- @business_gov_au - 8,568 Followers
- @AustralianArmy – 8,409 Followers
- @AuSenate – 6,840 Followers
Please note we’ve left out Ministerial accounts from our calculations.
Remember that quantity, while an easy yardstick, isn’t always the key to great social media engagement. There are plenty of fantastic accounts providing insight and fostering conversation which did not make the top 20 list. You just have to check out @fairwork_gov_au, @MoneySmartTeam and @ANMMuseum for some examples of great use of Twitter as a medium.
If you haven’t yet set up your social media presence on Twitter, it’s highly recommended that you at the very least secure your Agency’s name and set the account to protected mode. This will prevent the account being squatted on and will ensure that the account is ready to go when your organisation is ready to tweet. It will also protect the public from possibly misleading information issued in the name of your Agency.
With Twitter now being used by everyone from @ABARES to @WGEAgency it’s only a matter of time before your Agency’s CIO asks you to get involved. If you’re hesitant to dip your toe into the social media pool, please have a look at our proposed online engagement courses for the APS which we will be running throughout May and June. If you’re interested in attending and are an APS employee, please register your interest by sending an email to allan.barger [at] finance.gov.au.
Below you’ll find a video (and transcript) of a recent presentation from Twitter’s Adam Sharpe and Mike Brown recently given at a Gov 2.0 lunch event. Thank you to @DEEWR for the video.
Facilitator – Pia Waugh:
OK, we’ll get started, only a few minutes late. First of all thank you all very much for coming, I’ll just do a brief welcome and introduction. This is the second of the Gov 2.0 lunches for this year and its very wonderful to have some actual employees from Twitter here, they do exist apparently which is really good to see.
Just a couple of things, obviously there’s no food in here. What we’re going to do is as per the agenda is we’ll have these guys speak for about 35 minutes and then we’ll do ten minutes of Q&A. Then we’re going to have a couple of case studies and then we’ll wrap up with a close. And anyone who would like to come to lunch I actually have booked at a restaurant close by so just stick around and then follow the leader. And I’ll talk about the next Gov 2.0 lunch a little bit afterwards. My name’s Pia Waugh, since I last saw you all I have been escalated to the fascinating role of Director of Gov 2.0 so I look forward to doing some interesting stuff with that, so I’ll speak to all after. Thank you.
Speaker – Adam Sharpe:
Thank you Pia for that wonderful introduction, my name is Adam Sharpe. I lead the Government News and Social Innovation team for Twitter. I’d also like to introduce my colleague Mike Brown who’s on our international team and is sort of our first boots on the ground in Australia helping build our team here. In my role I, a little bit of background on me; I spent much of my career actually on Capitol Hill first as the Communications and Technology Director for U.S Senator and then as her Chief of Staff. So I have been in the seats that many of you have sat in in your careers and now have translated that skill set over to the Twitter side.
And so the talk this morning is going to be a bit of an overview. Knowing that we have a mix of folks in the room, some agencies that are doing tremendous work on Twitter and Pia’s been sharing some of your stories with us already today, and those of you who are just starting out. And I’ll be showing you just a few examples of lessons we’ve learned from the U.S experience of how government officials and agencies are making use of the platform and hopefully give you some ideas that you can steal and start to implement here. It will be very much a covering the waterfront sort of broad-based discussion in hopes of getting to the Q&A as quickly as possible and really hitting your specific questions.
So to get us started I want to give a little bit of context. We obviously just had an election in the United States and being a political geek everything I see is in these four year cycles. So to put some context around things, on election day 2008 there were just shy of two million tweets sent. That was a worldwide number; every language, every country, every user. That represents about five and half, six minutes of our volume today. In fact from more than 200 million active users worldwide we today see more than 400 million tweets which means that there are more tweets sent every two days in the world today that had ever been sent prior to the 2008 elections in the U.S and we were a two and a half year old company at that point.
When I joined the company about two and a half years ago the government wasn’t using Twitter too heavily. About a third of the House of Senate had accounts, maybe a quarter of the Cabinet agencies. Barack Obama was the only presidential candidate who actively used an account in 2008. Today in the United States every U.S Senator, 94 per cent of the U.S House, all but one Governor – Matt Mead of Wyoming we’re coming for you – and every single Cabinet agency is on Twitter and we’re actually seeing a trend now of Cabinet Secretaries getting on Twitter themselves. In the last Cabinet there were only two, I think we’re up to four now. The Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius launched her Twitter account actually this morning back in the States. And we’ve been seeing that trend largely because we see higher engagement with accounts that have a face essentially. And we’ll talk about that a little bit more later.
On the user side we see another story. The users themselves are more active and part of this is because Twitter is a community and people who are active in their communities, who take a vested interest in their neighbourhood, their town, their country and are trying to be part of that community in real life are also more likely to want to engage in a community online. And so we see the Twitter users are more likely to engage with news content, more likely to comment on news sites or have their own blog. In the U.S where we don’t have compulsory voting they’re more likely to try to influence someone’s vote, they’re more likely to try to go to a political meeting or a rally. So there’s an audience there that is particularly engaged and particularly strong at being an echo chamber for messages that you’re trying to put out, whether they’re political if you’re an elected official or informative from the agency perspective.
So we’ve seen over the course of say the last two or three years three distinct trends emerge in the impact Twitter has had in our ability to govern and use this tool in government and in the Gov 2.0 world. The first is this notion of scalable retail governing, the idea that government is still best when a constituent can walk up to someone, tell their problem and have it solved; have that handshake, that look in the eye and have some government official that says yes we will fix it we will help you, we will answer that question. It’s hard to do that when you’re in a city of hundreds of thousands or in a country of millions. So we’ve had to go through all these broadcast models over the years and take in a very wholesale approach to how we communicate with constituents.
With Twitter on the other hand we have the luxury of getting back some of that one-on-one contact with all those benefits of scalability. That ability to solve one person’s problem in a public way so other people find the same solution and feel that sense of connectivity. More importantly just from a faith in government standpoint they can see the good work government is doing, have a better understanding of what’s happening behind those walls, demystifying the institution and humanising those who choose to serve in government. Far too often we sit in our offices, in elected offices or in agencies and work day in day out solving problems of thousands of constituents and each of them may only tell one or two friends what that agency did for them. Now those impacts can happen on a bigger stage and remind people what these institutions are there to help them with.
The second is this notion of the town square in your pocket. Now there was a time in almost every culture whether it’s the U.S, whether its Australia or its Japan and Korea where we had a village society. People would meet in the village square and talk through the community’s problems. Again over generations and generations and population growth that became harder and harder and as much as people want to be involved in their community, to want to take some ownership in driving the success of their country as a whole, life gets in the way. It’s hard to get to that town council meeting, it’s hard to show up at that parents’ council meeting at the school when you have laundry to do, you have a second job, you’re trying to put meals on the table. But when you can be part of that conversation and engage with your neighbours and your government from the convenience of your mobile phone or just sitting at home while doing other things it can be incredibly powerful.
And then the last element is this real time measure of citizen response, the idea that rather than looking at just one letter or one phone call to instantly be able to measure these natural conversations as they happen, conversations that maybe just a few years ago were taking place at a café or an office water cooler, behind closed doors. So you have this sense that they’re happening but you don’t know that these are emerging. For example the centres for disease control in the United States have started to discover that they can detect flu outbreaks sooner by seeing people talk about the flu on Twitter. Then they start seeing those patterns emerge in hospital admissions. The U.S geological survey is spotting earthquakes from tweets about earthquakes sometimes coming about 30 seconds ahead of the sensors actually being tripped. And we’re not polling these people, we’re not calling them saying have you felt an earthquake today? We’re just measuring those natural reactions but they’re happening in a space where we can measure them and that can give us very powerful insight.
So I’m going to give a quick overview of just a handful of techniques, of skills, or examples of things that can drive engagement, drive follower growth, drive mentions of your agency. This is as I said at the outset a bit of a covering the waterfront. I’ll go through them a little bit quickly, I’ll try to give them as much cohesion as possible but I want to give you an idea of the different areas we can talk about so when we get to the Q&A you can tell me yes lets drill down into that one or talk about that one a little bit more.
These best practices in fact are in front of you every day. They’re rooted in the experience you come and see every time you visit Twitter. These basic concepts of what makes Twitter a great community, a great platform for sharing in conversation. This concept of discovering, finding conversations and issues and topics that interest you then joining those conversations by sharing your own content, then engaging with your followers and others in the community. Yes some promotion; there can be self-promotion or promoting other peoples content through re-tweets or links to their work. And that almost forms this lather, rinse, repeat cycle if you will of the techniques and strategies for being successful on the platform.
I want to start here with this concept of discovery and listening. Forty percent of Twitter users never send a tweet but they still actively log in every day to listen to conversations and hear about the topics that interest them. When you walk into a cocktail party what’s going to lead to a better conversation; flinging open the doors and saying hello everyone I’ve arrived! New topic. Or milling around the room listening to the conversations and seeing where you have something compelling to add and then joining into that one. So the first step to being successful in what you share on Twitter is to listen to what other people are talking about. Now most of you are probably already familiar with the regular search tools, you’ve used that box on the top to search for a term that matters to you. But when you go to Twitter dot com slash search you also see this little link for advanced search where you can open up a lot more power and be very specific in what you’re looking for.
Recently we announced several new search filters that can allow you to be even more precise. Filters based on content type so you can search for a term and then add pic dot Twitter dot com if you just want to find tweets with photographs. Or filter colon videos or filter colon links if you’re looking for tweets that have videos linked from them or linking to news articles and so on. So you’re looking for elements just from other government accounts or verified accounts. If you’ve created a list of accounts, let’s say you’ve created a list of every local official in the country or your other agency accounts and you’re just trying to see what’s happening within that universe. You can provide us with a Twitter list name and it will look for that search term just within the tweets that list sent. And then there’s also a geographic search where you can type in your search term near, give a major city and then a radius in kilometres or miles. And we can send around via PL list of all these filters. If you use TweetDeck you can actually build out these filers through a very easy interface in the latest version of TweetDeck where you can in each column narrow down what you’re looking for and track the issues and the topics that matter to you.
Now on the sharing front perhaps the most important thing an agency can do on Twitter is keep your constituents informed and this can be just alerting them to the good work of the agency as the environmental protection agency in the U.S did here after super storm Sandy. Or it can have a strong policy component. The U.S government and the Chinese government have been debating over the last many years the issues of air quality in Beijing, that the Chinese have been underreporting the pollution in the air. So the E.P.A put an air quality sensor on the roof of the U.S Embassy as its still sovereign soil and they tweet out live air quality results all day every day from downtown Beijing.
You can also let people see behind the curtain, see what the work of the agency in real-time by live tweeting, particularly when you have a major event or initiative that you’re driving. Here we have examples if the U.S State Department driving the event where the Secretary of State at the time Hillary Clinton was holding an even that was closed to press. There were no cameras but if you’re interested in those issues you could follow the State Department and get that minute by minute tic toc. The French delegation to the G20 brought you along for the ride. Live tweeting what the delegation was doing every moment of the conference so if you were interested in that you’d have a connection there.
We have found that accounts that have these spurts of activity on Twitter see above average follower growth, that when people come in and see that when something meaningful is happening you’ll take me along for the ride, you will bring me into the room with you and share what is happening. That adds tremendous value to the account. This going behind the scenes can also include photographs, photographs which result in engagements rates of sometimes three times higher than tweets that don’t have photographs. The highest engagement comes when those are photographs that aren’t the simple pose of the Secretary with ‘insert other official here’ but actually give you some glimpse behind those walls, again demystifying the institution.
Use meaningful hashtags. Now here is a hashtag The White House used called My2K. To set up the scene here it was during a budget fight with Congress where they were debating taxes and whether to allow some tax cuts to lapse where the average increase would be about $2000 per American family. So the President held a press conference right around here and said tell us your story, tweet with hashtag My2K and let us know what a $2000 increase in taxes would mean to you. And for the rest of the day this is measured in tweets per minute. There were a good one or two hundred stories being submitted every minute for the rest of that day. These are people who are now being followed by their friends and members of their community. So now this White House message is being communicated by this echo chamber of followers through their communities, through their relationship networks. And more importantly on the political strategy side it’s giving the White House and the agencies involved stories they can tell. It’s no longer some arcane piece of legislative text that they’re bringing to reporters. Someone calls from a local community they could say here are five stories of people in your town and what it means to them. That can be so much more compelling than saying sub-section five of paragraph two will expire at midnight.
Another view of this is, and here the colours can be a little hard to see on this screen but this was a speech President Obama gave on immigration two years ago in El Paso Texas. And the sort of turquoise line moving down here at the bottom are tweets people commenting on the issue who were following and engaging with the White House directly. The orange line was just using the hashtag. And you notice in the days leading up to the event these were about the same, it was essentially a closed conversation between The White House and their followers. But as soon as that speech was live on TV you saw this big spike of people using the hashtag, people who were engaged on this issue but not necessarily following The White House. If The White House or the immigration service had been focussed only on their followers they would have been having a conversation with this population alone and left on the table all these other constituents who clearly have an interest in the issue. So pay attention to those hashtags.
Now I mentioned at the outset 40 per cent of Twitter users don’t necessarily tweet but login every day. A lot of others use Twitter exclusively as a broadcast mechanism. Twitter is most effective when the conversation is a two way street and this could take several forms. It can just be routine apropos. Here I think is an example from up top, the US Department of Education and the Veterans Administration in the U.S explaining answers to someone asking about veterans’ benefits. At the bottom a policy debate between a member of Congress and a constituent.
Now sometimes I realise with agencies and everything else on your plate it’s hard to necessarily keep up that rhythm of replying every day and so on and that’s when Q&A’s, sort of structured events can have meaning, particularly when there’s a face behind it, say a Cabinet Secretary or other principal in the agency. The U.S Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is particularly strong at this. He will routinely tweet out something like we see in this tweet, “I’ve got a few minutes before my next meeting, who has questions”? He takes five or six questions, he’s doing it from a Blackberry in the back of his car heading back to the office. But it’s a public forum and even though he only answers maybe five or six you see an increase in engagement with the agency account moving forward and with the Secretary’s account himself moving forward because people feel that it’s an agency that’s open to questions and is willing to be helpful.
No-one is expecting you to answer every single question that comes in but there’s a giant gap of perception between I have as good a chance as anyone else of getting my question answered and I have no chance at all. It would be the difference between not getting called on in our Q&A later or being locked outside that door and being told on no we’re talking in here, you have to stay outside. This is most successful with principals, we’ve seen agencies have good success with it through a branded agency account as well but where you can move the principal on to be that voice you have even more success. And now do we have, you know it occurred to me I did have one video in here, ah here we go. So here’s a Q&A the President did recently and I’ll say something shortly after.
(Video playing in background)
Now there’s a moment towards the end of that video that I want to draw your attention to. It’s when Cory Schulman the President’s advisor says “Mr President if you hit refresh six more questions will come in and we can move on to something else” and he says “no, Michael has a question, its straightforward, I think it deserves an answer”. Michael isn’t a journalist, he’s not a campaign donor, jus some guy who was flicking through Twitter one day and saw the President is taking questions, typed in a question, a few minutes later had a direct reply from the President. A few minutes after that saw a YouTube video of the President telling his staff no we’re not going to move on because Michael has a question, all in the arc of 45 minutes, an hour. Now Michael’s just one person in a country of hundreds of millions but that is incredibly powerful, not just in the political terms for the President but for an agency or a Secretary or a Minister of Parliament, that notion that my elected officials, my government officials care about Michael. Tomorrow I could be Michael, tomorrow you could be Michael and get that question answered without having a camera and a microphone or a chequebook. It’s incredibly powerful.
I keep hitting this theme of going behind closed doors and demystifying the institution. I want to show another example here and this was – so much of government happens in these windowless conference rooms and no-one really sees what happens inside, these conversations from two sides negotiating, two agencies trying to work together on a program. A member of Congress and The White House in this case where during the same debate we were talking about a moment ago The White House Press Secretary and this Republican Congressman starting tweeting at each other. Weeks of negations behind closed doors where no-one knew it was happening in The White House, we’d just see people come out to the cameras give some short statement and walk away and now the conversation was happening in public. And you notice towards the bottom here this isn’t a reporter this is just a constituent who jumped in and joined the conversation and the Congressman responded to him too. So now you have this three way conversation between The White House, a Member of Congress and just some concerned citizen. It can have an incredible power on government when people feel that notion of being involved in the conversation. They engage more on the policy points that follow. They wait that extra beat and instead of seeing just the bit monolithic building or the spokesman at a podium they see someone they can relate to.
I’d like to wrap up with some just final notes on promoting the account. If you haven’t built out your profile please do. This means strong photography for the avatar and the background of your header image, it means a description in your profile, a biography links back to your website. Even though Twitter isn’t thought of very often as a website so much as it is a service it still shows up in search results so thinking about what key words you put in your profile and on the website that that’s linking to so that people can find your account even if they’re not looking for it on Twitter search engine can be very important.
First question I usually get at events is how do I get more followers? Simple answer is ask. The single best way to gain followers is to tell people what your account name is which means it should be at the bottom of your email signature, it should be on letterhead, on business cards, signage at your events. When your principals show up and do TV interviews, ask the producer hey when the Secretary is speaking and you put their name at the bottom of the screen would you mind also putting their Twitter handle? Most of the time you’d be surprised, the producers say yes because mainly so many of them are already doing it for their reporters.
You’ve seen these follow and tweet buttons, when you put those on your web pages so people can engage with them either to follow your account or to share your content it can provide an additional lift. One study last year showed that putting a tweet button on the page resulted in nearly seven times more social shares of that page than not having a tweet button on the page. That’s of course an average of across all websites and content types.
Then don’t forget about S.M.S. One of the beautiful things about Twitter is that you don’t need a laptop computer or even a Smartphone to use it. You can use Twitter entirely over text messaging and many people do. Now here in Australia Telstra has a number, it’s a little longer than the number we have in the U.S, we need to work on that, but if you were to send a text to this number that said follow and someone’s user name you would now start getting all their tweets as text messages. You never have to touch a computer, you never even have to create a Twitter account. If you go into your Twitter profile and actually associate your mobile number to your Twitter account then when you send texts to that number those texts will go out as tweets from your account and you can actually put in follow and unfollow commands, reply and re-tweet commands and do it all over text messaging. Some disaster services in the U.S like Federal Emergency Management Agency FEMA have been using this after disasters where evacuees will show up at a shelter or disaster response centre that FEMA has set up and there will be a sign saying text whatever tornado one to this number and then start getting these updates from us when your neighbourhood’s clear to go back and inspect your house or when essential services are restored. These people in many cases don’t even realise they’re using Twitter. But instead of having to negotiate with the phone company to create some short code and spin that up at a cost of thousands of dollars and days of time FEMA can just go in and create a Twitter account.
We talked a little bit about when your principals show up on T.V. I want to show this example from CNN, Piers Morgan Tonight, and this is a measure of new follows per minute during a typical broadcast for Piers Morgan’s account. These spikes correlate exactly when this graphic appears on screen. This is a demonstration not only that people will respond to that call to action, that if you ask them follow me they will. When they’re watching T.V they’re watching with a device in their hand, they have the tool to take action immediately and this is true when people are watching T.V, it’s true when they’re attending events which means if you are hosting a big public event you should have a hashtag on display as a queue to people to engage with you. You should have your account names on display so people can follow you. Live tweeting a televised event results in three to four times an increase of followers and engagement on the account. Putting those handles on the air can increase mentions and growth of two to eight times, hashtags two to ten times engagement on the account because have both that signal of what word to use, they may not know what your hashtag or account name is, as well as that reminder to tweet, to follow, to take action and have that device in their hand.
Conversation does not have to be limited to Twitter alone. Some of you may have experimented with embedded tweets, so you tweet something out and then you lift that tweet and drop it back in on your web page and now this lives on your page with full functionality. So if you’ve put out a report or a press announcement and you tweeted about it and then when you posted that report on the website you embed that tweet on that page people can then while reading your content with one click re-tweet your tweet to their followers, reply to you or ask a question and follow your account, all without ever leaving your web page. You can even embed full timelines of tweets again with all that interactive ability; the re-tweet buttons, the fave buttons, the reply buttons. If you go to your user settings this can be a timeline, so show me all the tweets from a particular user or from a list of users.
There can be a search result using some of those filters. So let’s say you’re an agency that manages 100 different accounts and you wanted to create a search for any tweets that contain pictures from across those 100 accounts and now have this widget that you drop in on your web page just to be the scrolling list of the photos coming from around the country. You can do that. And you can tie it to favourites. So you can set up an account to just go around looking at things on Twitter, favouriting the tweets that you like and then use that to curate the tweets that appear in that timeline. So it maybe just flagging news articles or reports from academia that are relevant to your agency and having that as a module on your home page where you can surface that quality content that people that visit your site.
So I made the reference earlier to lather, rinse, repeat; you don’t do any of these things in a silo and when you’re done you don’t stop, you repeat this cycle again and again and again because you have to strike that balance of listening, of sharing, of engaging and then promoting yourself and others to increase the volume of conversation and the size of the room you’re having the conversation in.
And I’ll leave you with one final and very important note; we can help, this is why we’re here. Mike is leading our team, building a team here in Australia to be a face that you can call, that you can seek help from. My team in Washington is also on call and the same way as we do with the U.S Government if you’re working with a major initiative and you’re just trying to think through how might Twitter be useful here, give us a call, we’d be happy to chat with you. We can set up Twitter 101 trainings, we can help with impersonation reports. We have a very strong policy; people cannot pretend to be you. So if there’s an account out there that’s using your agency’s seal or the photo of your principal and claiming to be your agency or your official we can help resolve that. We can help with account verifications, those blue badges that let the public know that this is an official account, the official account. And we’re working with Pia to develop a list of all the federal agencies here in Australia. If there are security issues, you’ve been locked out of your account or if you have any other question we can help.
And we can also help give you access to Twitter analytics which is a tool I’ll give a quick overview of here in closing which really could help you measure your performance. Across the top it’s a 30 day view in six hour increments of your mentions, follows and unfollows. So you can pinpoint those moments where you’re extremely successful or unsuccessful in the content you’re producing. And you can drill down on individual tweets of the last 30 days to see what the engagement was on those tweets, to see what their reach was. Was there something you tweeted that generated a big blossoming of re-tweets and got out to a much larger audience than you’d normally reach? This data is downloadable so you can do some of your analysis offline. If you want to go into Microsoft Excel or something and make charts for your principals and presentations around the agency it can help you develop a better understanding for what content is landing with your audience and what content is not so you can make it a more impactful account.
It can also show your follower group and where your followers are. Now right now internationally it will show the location at the country level so you can see for example this is, I don’t know if anyone is here from the foreign ministry or an agency that works overseas, you could if there were other countries where you’re drawing a lot of attention. It will identify what the top cities are within Australia that are following your account. And also identify some of their other interest areas. Who are the ten most common accounts that your followers also follow? What are the other topics they are interested in in addition to the topics you tend to tweet about? So you get a better understanding of your audience and perhaps opportunities of who you might want to engage with to try to amplify your message.
Gov at Twitter dot com is an email address to reach out to our government and politics team. You can also follow at Gov on Twitter which is where we tweet out great examples of how government officials and agencies and candidates are using the platform. If your agency has done something particularly neat please send us an email because we’d like to tweet about that too. We tend to have a lot of U.S examples because we’re sitting there right in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue and see the capital out our window so we find these things easily. But we know you’re doing great things here, Pia’s been sharing some with us and we’d like to hear your stories first hand.
So with that thank you for indulging me for the first half of our session here and I guess we’ll now move over to the couches and take your questions.
(Applause)
Facilitator – Pia Waugh
What I might do is I might actually just throw in a couple of other quick points just because I think it’ll actually address some of the questions as they come up as well. So first of all within my role in the Department of Finance we are obviously chatting to these guys and there’s a couple of things we’re looking to do. First of all the government list of Twitter accounts that we maintain we’re going to be updating that and talking to everyone and making sure that it’s as up to date as possible and sending through a full list so they can get verified which actually helps with escalating issues and such down the track as well which is very handy.
We just announced a couple of days ago we’re going to be doing some online engagement training on how to use social media and other online tools more effectively for co-production of policy and projects and such. We will be working collaboratively to create some case studies and some documentation, pull together some lists of tools and forensics and analysis stuff which will be useful to people and other visualisation tools as well. And also obviously pointing to the many really useful industry courses, training materials and case studies and methodologies that are out there, so not trying to reinvent the wheel just very much trying to provide a little bit of a step up to assisting people in the public service to being able to engage online effectively. So there’s going to be some good work happening there.
As it turns out I was just notified that both Damien and John who were going to be briefly speaking to you are not actually available now so we’ve got a little bit more time for Q&A which is good and then I’ll be just wrapping up for the last five minutes with a couple of last useful announcements for you.
So questions from the floor; I might kick off one question just to give you a moment to think, but one of my first questions I did a short stint in computer forensics a while back so I guess one of my questions for you is how do you do analysis around who is engaging to determine if a particular topic is being gamed and I mean maybe Michael could have been a lobbyist or a sock puppet or a plant, so how do you actually determine that context around the validity of comments and other representativeness of comments coming through?
Answer – Speaker – Adam Sharpe
Well there are a few elements. I think right after that one of the things that has been very helpful with The White House is the first time they did one of these Q&A’s they did it as a big Twitter town hall they called it and it was in the east room of The White House, the President was on stage taking tweets from a big screen and you you had all the network camera crews there. It was announced a week in advance and it allowed all the different interest groups in Washington mobilise their followers and so on and so forth. Since then it’s been more common to use the examples we showed here which is I have ten minutes, do you have any questions? And right off the bat that has limited the ability for outside groups to try to mobilise their followers and stuff that ballot box if you will because it’s really just the people who are acting on it immediately.
Now it’s possible that some of the questions that come in then are still from a campaign operative and so on and I’m sure you’ve seen examples of that. At that micro level for the Q&A’s it really tends to be the moderators gut. The staff can sort of see when it’s a talking point from the opposition or something like that. When you are doing more of an in-depth data analysis there are certain patterns you can do and we’ve seen political science programs at universities do a lot of work on this, looking at things like follower webs and seeing that there’s a cluster of a community and being able to pull those things out. We have not seen a lot of use of that or implementation of that in government yet, that still tends to be more of an academic exercise to get to that purity, still a lot more of that just that looking at it and taking the gut call in government.
Facilitator – Pia Waugh
Mike?
Speaker – Mike Brown
Nothing to add; let’s go on to the next question.
Facilitator – Pia Waugh
I’ll have to show you some of the computer forensic tools I’ve been playing with.
Speaker – Mike Brown
Oh I’d enjoy that.
Facilitator – Pia Waugh
Any other questions?
Question from the floor:
Hi, I’ve got two questions. The first one’s a housekeeping question. We have an account we need addressed [laughs]. Do we go to you Pia or do we go directly to you guys?
Facilitator – Pia Waugh
If you drop it through to me I can send it through as part of the bulk thing that we’re going to get fixed. We actually just, although it’s not formally – actually no we’re recording, we actually did that for another account, a very high profile account that we’re just in the process of getting fixed at the moment so definitely looking at doing some stuff like that. And once we have verification of that list of known government accounts then any of those government accounts that puts in a request about an issue I can get to prioritisation, so that will actually get issues fixed a lot quicker for government in the future. But yeah sure drop us an email and I’ll take it up with these guys and we’ll get it sort out as part of the batch and if it’s really urgent then just send it straight through and we’ll sort it out urgently for you.
Question from the floor (cont’d):
Yeah it’s just someone impersonating one of our campaigns.
Facilitator – Pia Waugh
Ah, yep we get a bit of that.
Answer – Speaker – Mike Brown
If someone is impersonating one of your campaigns the first thing you can do is go to support dot Twitter dot com and there’s a form there to file for impersonation. What should happen is once you do that you’ll get an email back from Twitter with kind of a confirmation code in it. If you send us that confirmation code and you can even send it to us today we will expedite it and make sure it’s handled right away.
Answer – Speaker – Adam Sharpe
And you can do that using that gov at Twitter address.
Question from the floor (cont’d):
OK great. The second question is just about hashtags; in our department a lot of people want to use hashtags all the time. Just after some you know words of wisdom to try and give them some advice to steer them away from that. I don’t really particular want our tweets clogged up with multiple hashtags that really don’t have any use, to me they’re sort of more to tie together conversations and for events rather than as topic guides and that’s sort of what, there’s sort of a bit of a perception out there that that’s what they should be used for.
Answer – Speaker – Adam Sharpe
I think it’s important to strike a balance. I think there’s sort of two ways to use hashtags in the government or political sense. One is like the example we showed of hashtag immigration and finding a conversation that people are having and jumping into the pool and becoming part of that conversation. The other is more of the politically messaged hashtag like the My2K from The White House. In the first case you don’t want to use it if no-one’s having that conversation and so I wouldn’t use hashtags simply as a tagging or categorisation of your tweets. In fact if you’re having so much volume of content where you feel the need to tag and categorise it may actually be an argument to create additional Twitter accounts and have the master account be re-tweeting just the best of the rest so that someone can follow the main agency account to get that overview of the issues you handle. But then if they have a particular issue they follow that subsidiary account to really drill down. But if there is an active public conversation that you find through searching around a particular hash tagging issue by all means join that conversation.
On the more branded ones it’s very easy to overdo it. If you’re going to use them make them count. So try to come up with another cute hashtag every day of the week people will tire rather quickly. But to take The White House example having one initiative once every few months around a very well defined hashtag with a very specific call to action, that that hashtag was not simply to use My2K to talk about tax issues but it was use this hashtag to tell your story of what this tax increase would mean to you. That combination of infrequency and direct call to action made it more powerful.
Question from the floor:
Hi how are you? I’ve just got a quick question and it’s more, I think it’s going to come down to a matter of opinion but professional versus personal Twitter accounts, particularly for more senior executive agents within government, what’s Twitter’s kind of view on this, what do you guys recommend when you come into government agencies and give them advice?
Answer – Speaker – Mike Brown
I think your right that it is a bit of an opinion. One of the great things about Twitter is it can help humanise and personalise somebody who’s in a senior position. And so someone who stays purely on protocol and directly according to the book may be missing out on some of the benefit of Twitter by sharing some of their personal interests or some of their not at work time. I think what we would say is that there’s a way that you can share your interests without revealing your personal life, because we all have a personal life that we want to protect and it may not be appropriate to share that with the world but expressing one’s interests perhaps you know one of your colleagues is passionate about a particular sport team or they have a charitable cause that is near and dear to their heart or there’s a school or academic institution that they care about; talking to a certain extent about those types of topics can be a great way to personalise and create more connections between your colleague and the follower base. But you know no need to get too much into you know private time with family or photos of children or things if that’s uncomfortable for the person, so it’s really striking that balance. But we do think some mix of the personal and the professional together creates the best possible experience.
Answer – Speaker – Adam Sharpe
And just to echo the beginning of Mike’s answer there; it really is about giving additional connection points, that if they simply see you as a government official that’s not often the foundation for a warm and fuzzy relationship. But if it’s broader and they have that sense where yes you’re a government official, you have that job but we are fans of the same team as Mike said. Or we wake up in the morning and we have the same thought when we look in the mirror or we shop at the same place on the weekend. For that one moment we are relating just as fellow humans, and in my case Americans, yours Australians. And what we have found is that extra little openness means that the policy message that may follow is so much more impactful. And then it’s really at your comfort level how personal you can be.
I give examples very often of a U.S Senator from Missouri Claire McCaskill and there’s two great examples, I used another one at another even earlier so I’ll use a different one now; she about a year ago woke up one Sunday morning ad tweeted I am sick and tired of looking and feeling so fat. Every press spokesman in Washington gasped at the same time and there was just this thought of a United States, senior United States Senator tweeting that just seems so unheard of. Unsurprisingly it got massive engagement and it was supportive engagement. Yes you had some of the snarks coming in there but you also had particularly women in her state being supportive. And so the Senator actually started live tweeting her weight loss over the course of the next many months. And what’s interesting is if you strip out all those personal tweets and you only look at her policy tweets and her political tweets over that same time period that weekend was also the turning point in increased engagement around her political message, because people were now pausing and she wasn’t just that talking head behind the lectern on T.V she was someone who wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror and has the same thought that so many others have and is going through the same struggle everyone else is. So exactly what that comfort level of how much of that to share is really a personal individual choice but being something broader than just that government figure can be very impactful for that government message.
Question from the floor:
Hi my name’s David Elliot. Thank you Adam and Mike, and Pia for bringing the guys in. And that was a great presentation; I think that your vision for how Twitter can bring back the village square and that discourse that’s been lost is spot on. I think that in Australia that future’s already here where politicians and agencies are engaging actively, it’s clearly happening already and for some time. And in Australia there’s an election this year and I think that Twitter will play into that election and I think that we’re at a point now where Twitter could actually, it’s such a powerful communication medium it will affect the outcome of the election. It won’t throw it either way in Australia because there’s a pretty big margin but it can impact elections. A concern that I would have as a constituent is that Twitter is not a utility, it’s not a public service, Twitter is a privately held U.S company. Does gov at Twitter have a philosophy or some value statements around things like censorship, bias, preferred models for government? Are we pro-democracy, are we pro flavour of the week? That’s a question I would have for you guys.
Answer – Speaker – Adam Sharpe
We’re pro an open exchange of information and we believe that providing a platform for communication is inherently good for the world. And so yes at the edges you’ll run into regimes that have a very contrary view to that and then you could perhaps draw the extrapolation that we’ve taken a position there. But in general our position is to provide that town square and allow others to bring the political conversation into it.
And so in the U.S election last year for example we worked closely with both the Obama and Romney campaigns on their Twitter strategies. Third party pollsters did a great deal of work studying Twitter and found that at least the U.S market has matured enough now where there was not a significant partisan bias one way or the other in the conversation that was taking place, at least when you go start to finish. There were certain events obviously that provoked a more intense reaction on one side of the aisle or the other and I think the more voices you bring into that square the more that balance happens naturally. Have I answered your question? I don’t know if you have anything…
Answer – Speaker – Mike Brown
Yeah I mean add just a bit to it, you know a company is made up of people and ultimately we are people and we make decisions and probably – we do our very, very best to make the right decisions. Ultimately we are not in the position of trying to judge or measure what people say, in fact you know there is content that passes through kind of Twitter all the time which is either maybe to some people reprehensible or threatening or distasteful that on a personal level we may not personally countenance but Twitter as a free and open exchange of information supports that kind of content.
However there are limits and those limits are pretty clearly defined in our terms of service which are listed on the web. So for example if I as a Twitter user physically threaten violence on another individual on Twitter that violates our terms of service. So we do not allow that, there is a method where someone can surface that to Twitter and Twitter will review it and if it, you know we feel that it violates those terms we will shut down that account. If a bought account tweets thousands of times in a short period of time at a certain hashtag, which happens once in a while, that will kind of destroy the ability of other people who were enjoying that conversation on that hashtag to have a civil discourse and so that violates our terms of service And so what we try to do through what we’ve published is make it pretty clear like not what you can say but how you can use Twitter and as long as you’re using Twitter in the right way you can kind of say what you want.
Facilitator – Pia Waugh
And of course the patriot act.
Speaker – Mike Brown
Say more.
Facilitator – Pia Waugh
[Laughs] Well I mean you know there’s terms of use but then there’s also the legal obligations you have to fulfil when asked to. So that’s worth just taking into account, it doesn’t make it right or wrong or it’s not a reason to not engage but it is something to take into account.
Speaker – Adam Sharpe
Well we should stress there that I mean to your point obviously when we operate in any country right now we’re based in the U.S but as we start to have employees in Australia it means that we’ll be subject to Australian laws on a great number of things and so on and so forth. We do take a position of defending our users and so you’ve probably seen press accounts at times when there have been attempts to access user information where we have defended a user’s right to defend themselves against that investigation. And our position there is that we are not defending what the users say we are defending their right to be able to say I don’t want my user information shared or defending their right to have that speech in this community. So to Mike’s point there is reprehensible speech but our definition of reprehensible may be different than yours may be different than anyone else so to allow that conversation to take place and allow good speech to drown out bad speech is a more scalable solution than trying to litigate down to that account by account level.
Facilitator – Pia Waugh
And that must be, sorry I’ll just, one more question on this; it must be tricky as a global entity who is based primarily in the U.S but who is operating in all these different legal frameworks to sort of say well which legal framework do we apply in this situation, because the user may or may not be in that country, the tech may or may not be in that country you know, is there actually a right for the Australian law to apply when apart from the user possibly actually being based here you know what actually applies. So it’s interesting.
Speaker – Adam Sharpe
It does get complicated and that’s why I think Mike and I are both fortunate to have a public policy expert among our colleagues [laughs] who navigates that and I know you met with him recently. And that is one of the things that when we do set up shop in a country like Mike is doing with our hirers here we want to make sure that we are creating an environment that is a positive, productive environment for our users in that country but also respectful of the standards and laws of that country.
Facilitator – Pia Waugh
Cool.
Question from the floor:
Hi, so a lot of us rather than being here from members offices or whatever are here from the apolitical public service and you’ve been talking a lot about how a mix of personal and professional content is great for building audiences. I’m from the Department of Broadband, we’ve done some things around like our hashtag to build a bit of community there but I was wondering if you could give an example or two of how people balance that personality without having a figurehead provided?
Answer – speaker – Adam Sharp
Well I think in the U.S the best example of an agency that is largely apolitical and has been very creative in how they have that personality without putting a principal out front has been NASA, the U.S space agency. You would be hard pressed to find in the U.S government a Twitter account with a greater personality than the Mars Curiosity Rover. You’ll be hard pressed to find a government official with a better sense of humour than that robot on a distant planet. And so I think that was one creative approach.
I think we’ve seen other agencies that have essentially created this notion of having some staffer who is a community voice there. So they are not necessarily a high level principal, they are not a senior executive but they’re someone burrowed deep in the agency that, they bring a little of their own personality to it within limits but have a voice and send out this signal that yes I’m here to be the agency’s voice to you our followers, the users, but I’m also your voice inside the agency. So you tell me what’s bothering you and I’ll knock on some doors and it then takes that personal tone of you know someone tweets them and they can come back and say I had to chase down the question but I found the guy who’s in charge of that and he’s going to come to a Twitter Q&A tomorrow because of you. And that person they have personality but they may not be sharing personal stories like the examples we were giving before it’s just its not this monolithic sort of press release voice of today the Ministry of blah, blah, blah announced and so in every tweet, it’s still a human being on the other end of that. So I think there’s some creativity.
At the farthest extreme I think you have – I don’t know if you’ve seen the account at Sweden which is a Swedish institute, so it’s a public private pro-tourism agency for the Swedish government that every week a different tweeter citizen is handed the credentials to at Sweden for a week. And for the week they can tweet whatever they want, they take questions from people all over the world and sometimes it’s an oddball who gets the keys. One time several months ago it was an outright racist and there were a lot of questions about that and the Swedish government said we’re not going to pretend we don’t have racists in our country, this account is a representation of our country and who it is and yes sometimes there will be comments that the vast majority of our people find reprehensible. And the moment the government said but we’re not shutting it down, it’s their turn, they have the keys until Sunday all of a sudden they saw this massive follower boost for the account because that’s a real account, its real voices and one week it’ll be a mother from the south of Sweden, next week it’ll be a business person, next week a farmer, and really represent the tapestry of the country. And so it doesn’t even need to be a single voice, it doesn’t even need to be a voice inside the agency. So those are three different directions you could take.
Facilitator – Pia Waugh
We’re actually right on two o’clock now and I know that we’re going to be following this up with lunch so I might actually wrap up just so that those that need to leave can and everyone else can follow up with heading over to the lunch facility. So I’ll just wrap up by saying so first of all anyone that’s interested in following any of this up please get in touch, obviously there’s already been lots of tweets with both Twitter handles that you can, you know, chat to them. But next month we’re going to be having Stuart Coleman from the Open Data Institute from the U.K, coming as well as Keith Booth from the New Zealand government to talk about open data policy and practice and also there’ll be a bit of an update of what’s happening in Australia by then which will be good. And so we’ll close it up now and I’d just like you to join me in thanking our guests for coming and speaking to us today.